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Kebabistan

Food writer and blogger Katie Parla certainly leads an enviable life, splitting her time between Italy and Turkey and chronicling traditional food culture in both countries.

Recently, Parla had a chance to visit eastern Turkey's Kars, a city famed throughout the country for its cheese (and, among the more literary-minded, for being the setting for Orhan Pamuk's "Snow"), where she had a chance to work side-by-side with some of the city's local cheese makers.

I asked Parla is she could share some thoughts about her experience in Kars (which she wrote about here). Our exchange is below:

How did you end up in Kars making cheese?
I was invited to Kars by my friend chef Şemsa Denizsel of Kantin. She has been making outrageously good sourdough bread with heirloom wheats from Kars for three years and was eager to see the grain fields and visit the water-powered mill that grinds grains for her flour. While in Kars, we called on her friend İlhan Koçulu who makes gravyer (gruyere) in his village. He showed us the process of his own cheese as well as that of kaşar. While visiting the kaşar workshop I was invited to try my hand at making this cheese. It looked difficult to make and turned out to be even harder than it looked.

Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti has been traveling around the world in the name of a project that is both admirable and ambitious (and certainly not without its perks): capturing images of the globe's grandmothers at work in their kitchens. The results of his project, "Delicatessen with Love," can be found here.

I recently reached out to Galimberti, who spent part of his project photographing grannies in Turkey, Armenia and Georgia, to find out more about his project and its origins. Our exchange is below:

1. Why did you decide to do this project?
When I started my trip around the world with the idea of making a documentary about CouchSurfing all my family was a little worried for the fact that I was going away from home for two years. I was going to travel in many different countries, sleeping at somebody's house, hosted by people that I didn't know. I then realized though that my grandmother was mostly worried about the food that I was going to eat. She told me something like: “Are you sure you want to go? What are you going to eat in Africa? And in China? You should stay at home. I can cook for you.”

All this made me laugh a lot and I told to my grandma: You know grandma? There are many grandmothers all over the world and I'm sure they will be happy to feed me and cook something special for me. This is the way I had the idea for this project!

2. Considering this blog's geographic interests, what stood out the most to you about the grandmas you met in Turkey and the Caucasus and their cooking?
As an Italian, I have to say that the places where I felt more like if I was at home are actually Turkey and Georgia. I feel the grandmothers there really similar and close to the Italian grandmothers... the way the treated me, the taste of their food. I really felt like I was at home in these places.

Photographer Dave Hagerman is the picture-taking half of the visually-arresting and wonderfully-written EatingAsia blog. Lately, Dave and his partner, Robyn Eckhardt, have been spending a lot of time in Turkey and chronicling their travels in a drool-inducing Tumblr called EatingTurkey.

During his most recent stay in Turkey, Hagerman also managed to make it down to Gaziantep, a city near the Syria border famed for its kebabs and baklava, on assignment for Saveur magazine to shoot a story about the city's grill masters.

I recently sent Hagerman some questions about his impressions of the trip to Gaziantep and the the role of the city's ustas ("masters" in Turkish) in keeping the local culinary culture alive. Our exchange is below:

1. You've travelled and eaten your way through much of Turkey -- what stood out for you about Gaziantep and its food culture?
For starters the minute you walk out your door it smells like grilling meat. You know you are in kebab country and it is everywhere - street corners, shops - indoors and out. You might not think you are hungry for kebab morning, noon and night but somehow you just are.

Also, the ustas display a certain amount of precision as they prepare/cook their kebabs, as if to say ' people in other parts of Turkey might do it that way, but we Antepians do it this way' -- in other words, the right way. Ingredients are key, meat -- particularly lamb -- must be sourced from only the best suppliers. It is an obsession. People would say that if it is not going to be the best, then don't bother.

While the recent lifting of the Russian embargo on Georgian wine was a cause for celebration -- both for Russian consumers, who had to go without their favorite bottles of Saperavi for some seven years, and for Georgian winemakers, who had to make due after losing access to a large market with a less-than-discerning wine palette -- questions are being about just how much of an impact this development will have on the Georgian economy.

From a report in the Financial, a Georgian economic news website:

"We do not expect these developments to have a tangible bearing on Georgia's creditworthiness in the near term," said Standard & Poor's credit analyst Ana Jelenkovic. "But they could lead to improvements in key economic and external indicators over the medium to longer term."

Thanks to sweeping new alcohol regulations passed by their parliament a few months ago, Turkish drinkers have had to come to terms with having greater restrictions on where and during what time they can buy a drink. Now, as part of the new law, they will also have to learn that alcohol is no longer their friend. Reports the Hurriyet Daily News:

Signs warning about the possible harms of alcohol consumption will be placed on the bottles of alcoholic beverages within 10 months, according to a statement published in the Official Gazette Aug. 11.

The statement about the warning labels to be put on alcoholic beverage packages, which was released by the Tobacco and Alcohol Market Regulatory Authority (TAPDK), specified three graphic warning signs and a written message to be placed on bottles containing alcohol.

Pictures will involve warnings against consumption under the age of 18, before driving and during pregnancy, while the written message will read, “Alcohol is not your friend.”

Thanks to its very large Armenian Diaspora community, the Greater Los Angeles area home to a number of outstanding Armenian restaurants. One of those restaurants, chef Edward Khechemyan's Adana, was the subject of a recent article by New York Times food writer Mark Bittman, who loves the restaurant so much that he goes there during every trip he makes to Los Angeles.

On a recent visit, Bittman had a chance to watch Khechemyan -- whose family has Armenian, Russian and Iranian roots (and, based on the restaurant's name, some connection to Turkey, as well) -- in action. From his piece:

One of my trips to L.A. was actually a trip to Glendale, arranged so that I could cook with Khechemyan. I was immediately impressed with his facility and his ease and especially his grilling technique. In his kitchen, Khechemyan moves quickly, and within 30 minutes, we had done four kebabs. The marinades are simple (he uses a lot of mild dried red chili powder, the kind you can most easily buy in Korean markets), and the grilling technique is not difficult. But it’s unusual: he grills slowly (over briquettes fired with gas, by the way), not too close to the fire, he insists, until gorgeously browned. The fire is not superhot, but it’s even — gas is good for that — and he keeps the grill grate a good six inches above the fire.

It wasn’t all grilling. Two of the best dishes we cooked were Iranian (“Persian,” Khechemyan clarifies). The first was baghali polo, extra-long basmati rice boiled halfway then steamed with garlic powder (an ingredient I haven’t used in 20 years or so, but hey . . . ), fava or lima beans and an infield’s worth of fresh dill. The other, a salad, is something I’ve been making all summer; if I were you, I’d just start chopping.

A this blog wrote about in a previous post, apricots hold a particularly important place in Armenian life, both culturally and economically. Writing for the wonderful Mashallah News website, journalist Liana Aghajanian delves deeper into this story, producing a beautiful ode to the apricot. From Aghajanian's piece:

Indeed, there is not an apricot in the world that tastes like the ones found in Armenia. It is more than just a piece of fruit – the weight of a country and a diaspora’s national psyche, with equal parts tragedy and nostalgia, rests on its shoulders.

Scattered across the world by the horrors of a genocide at the turn of the 20th century, the Armenian Diaspora’s feet have always been on the move, planted elsewhere by accident and circumstance, but constantly pulled back by the heavy gravitational force of Armenia. As immigrants in faraway lands struggling with a collective, passed down trauma and relishing in the nostalgic notions of homeland – a place kept neatly framed in scenic oil paintings hung on walls from Beirut to Boston, there is an intense longing for home, a place to feel grounded and whole in again, a place where an apricot can be so delicious, that no other apricot found in any other corner of the world will do.

The feeling can only be described in words that have no direct English translation. One of them is the Portuguese “Saudade”, a deeply melancholic state for the absence of something or someone. The other is a Welsh word, “Hiraeth”, defined by the University of Wales Trinity Saint David as “homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed.”

Forever homesick, Armenians are always searching for that fulfillment of home, for what was lost to be found.

Georgian wine and produce may again be appearing in Russian stores after Moscow lifted its seven-year long embargo, but the products remain the potential victims of regional politics. Case in point the recent news that a top Russian official has warned that the presence of a United States-funded bio research lab in Georgia could have a "limiting effect" on the import of Georgian wine.

The $150-million lab, the Richard G. Lugar Center for Public Health Research, was opened several years ago and is designed to help Georgia do research on infectious diseases. But Russia's "chief sanitary doctor" sees it differently, suggesting that cases of Georgian wine might also come with cases of African Swine Fever and other illnesses. Reports the Civil.ge website:

Just few months after Russia dropped embargo on Georgian wines and mineral waters, its chief sanitary doctor warned that presence of the U.S.-funded bio lab in Tbilisi would have “sharply limiting effect” on bilateral trade ties.

Gennady Onishchenko, head of Russia’s state consumer protection agency RosPotrebNadzor, which ordered ban on import of Georgian products to Russia in 2006, told Interfax news agency on July 20 that the laboratory represents “a powerful offensive potential.”

“Russia deems it to be a direct violation of BWC [Biological Weapons Convention],” Onishchenko was quoted by Interfax.

The other day I wrote about the latest disturbing urban development in Istanbul, the bulldozing of centuries-old vegetable gardens alongside the city's historic Byzantine-era walls. Writing for the Atlantic Cities website, Istanbul-based journalist Jennifer Hattam adds more color to the story:

In the shadows of the 1,500-year-old fortifications ringing Istanbul’s historic core, farmers push wheelbarrows of freshly harvested greens through small vegetable gardens, continuing a centuries-long tradition in the area. This past week, however, the farmers watched in dismay as bulldozers moved into the Yedikule neighborhood, dumping trash-strewn dirt and rubble onto the fertile soil of two of those gardens.

"I don’t know what we’ll do, where we’ll go if our land gets destroyed as well. We don’t have anything else," says one woman who works a nearby plot along with her husband, scraping out a living selling their chard, corn, radishes, purslane, and herbs at Istanbul’s wholesale fruit and vegetable market.

Like many of the people currently farming along the old city walls, the couple are migrants from Turkey’s Black Sea coast, who have followed in the footsteps of the Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, and Albanians who tended the land before them. The specific gardens currently being razed have been identified on a map dating back to 1786, but historical sources indicate that small-scale agriculture was present in the area not long after the UNESCO-designated city walls were built in the 400s.

For the third year, Yerevan played host to an annual festival celebrating dolma -- the dish made by stuffing grape leaves and other vegetables with an assortment of ingredients. Reports the Asbarez website:

Taste-Testers flocked through the flanked winged oxen of the Sardarabad memorial for the third annual Dolma Festival on Wednesday, July 10. Traditional music, singing, and dancing set the mood for the festival as 24 groups locked in a battle of vine leaves and stuffing for prizes in a number of categories including the longest Dolma.
The festival was organized by the Armenian Cookery Traditions Development and Protection Organization (ACTDP) and exposed visitors to a number of variations of the traditional Armenian dish. Qajik Levonyan, a representative of the Araratian Restaurant , said that the name of the three thousand-year-old dish stems from the Armenian word Dol, which means vine leaves, and that the recipe’s secret lies in the freshness of the ingredients.

As previously reported on this blog, though, the dolma festival is more than just about dolma. This being the Caucasus, the event also has a political subtext to it, with ACTDP head Sedrak Mamulyan telling Armenian reporters two years ago that one of the motivating factors behind the festival was to keep dolma (or "tolma" as he called it) from being "appropriated" by neighboring countries. "We have done nothing to patent our national dishes," he said at the time.

About Kebabistan

For many of us, the real action in Eurasia is happening in the region’s kitchens. From noodles in Kyrgyzstan to doner in Turkey and everything else edible in between, Kebabistan brings you the latest developments in Eurasia’s food culture.

About The Author

Kebabistan is written by Yigal Schleifer, a freelance journalist based in Washington, DC. Between 2002 and 2010 he was based in Istanbul, where he worked as a correspondent for EurasiaNet, covering Turkey and the surrounding region. Schleifer is the co-creator of IstanbulEats.com, a guide to Istanbul's "culinary backstreets" and also one of the authors of the 2009 Fodor's guide to Turkey.

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